Trip Catchup Take 1

As we've finally settled down enough to have some time to be home and post about our travels, it's time to get this blog up-to-date! I'm shocked to see that we have trips as far back as April that remain un-posted, so we'll have to try to knock a bunch out in a row. Get ready for lots and lots of sporadically labeled pictures.

Backlog Trip #1: York, UK (pictures here)

In what was probably our longest Peugeot road trip to date, we drove up to York in the north east of England for a 2 days and a night with our friend from Syria. York is known for its cathedral, the York Minster which was the first building to rise higher than the Great Pyramid, the highest structure in the world for 3500 years or so. York was really charming (though rainy while we were there) and you can definitely understand why everyone here would say it is the number 1 or 2 nicest English town. On the way back, we made a long detour to check out the longest bridge in England (5^th in the world?), the Humber Bridge, which was pretty amazing.

Backlog Trip #2: Northern Italy (pictures here)

Most of our British friends here are appalled by the number of sites and destinations that we cram into our trips, but I think our long weekend in Italy will stand as the high watermark of our insanity for some time. What began as a long weekend in Venice turned into what seemed like a competition to ride every mile of railway track in Northern Italy, as our travel map bellow suggests.

The trip began with a bit of recklessness from the start: over a 3 day UK holiday weekend I saw it was much cheaper to fly into Rimini south of Venice and out from Milan that direct to Venice, so I booked it. Upon further research, it turns out these locations are 4+ hours from Venice, but no matter, we had 3 nights and 3 days to do it all. We landed in Rimini, which is a tiny airport and the one taxi waiting left pretty quickly. After a 20 minute wait for the bus, I remembered the airport wasn’t THAT far from our hotel on google maps, and vaguely remembered we needed to walk to the beach then north. Off we went with all of our things in the backpack, and 4 hours later were still heading north, looking for any vehicle that looked even a little like a cab to collapse into. We did finally find our hotel (on foot), and got up early the next morning to spend a few hours on the beach before catching the train to Venice.

In Venice our travel challenges continued when our hostel was full and we needed to find a place to sleep for 2 nights of a very busy May weekend. Thankfully, a bookstore nearby had a sign out front advertising a B&B (beds and books). The owner showed us 8 beds he had set up in his storage room amidst hundreds and hundreds of Italian books and magazines. We smiled and said it was great.

After the challenges of getting there, Venice was well-worth our hardships and we loved it. The water everywhere, tiny winding streets on which you have to suck in let people pass, the food, and the architecture were all amazing. There really is nowhere like Venice. We had a great time taking boat trips out to two of the other islands in the Venetian Lagoon, Murano and Burano. Murano was the glass-making capital of Europe for centuries, and Burono is a fishing village with beautiful brightly-painted houses.

Our last and most extreme travel ‘hiccup’ occurred at the airport in Milan. The woman at the ticket counter kindly showed me that our return tickets had been purchased for a date 3 weeks in the future. DISASTER. At the Ryanair help desk, the attendant couldn’t even say out loud the price of 2 tickets for the flight leaving in 1 hour for Birmingham, she had to type the number into a calculator and slide it to me discreetly. Well, I guess the good news was we could stay in Italy to wait 3 weeks for the price of those tickets.

After a few dark and desperate hours, the airport internet café came through huge and we found a flight back to Birmingham from Pisa late the next day. Back on the train we went, making the 5 hour trip to Pisa and arriving late that night. We emailed our respective employers to tell them work the next day wasn’t going to work so well, and decided to make the most of the beautiful day and enjoy our impromptu visit to Pisa.

Checking our tickets 100 times and arriving at the airport 3 hours before our flight, we managed to board a plane out of Italy and breathed a sigh of relief when we touched down in England that night. It was truly an amazing/insane Italian adventure! I think our British friends are right, we are crazy.

John - Good-on-yer, mate!

Last weekend we saw off our good friend John, Nick's closest work colleague here, who moved to AUSTRALIA last week. He's transferring to the Brisbane office for - well, for as long as he wants to stay, really. We had his going-away party last weekend, then helped him finish packing and sent him off. We're excited/proud/tiny bit jealous of this adventure that he's on.

There were around 20 people at the party, with 8 nations represented - I love that about Nick's workplace, so different from mine where I'm the only 'diversity' going. There were people from Malaysia, China, Portugal, America (hmm, who could they be?), Spain, Poland, Syria, Wales, England, etc. We were at a Mexican restaurant, and I was sitting next to our Polish friend Lucazs, who like many others had ordered fajitas. His food had arrived and mine hadn't, and I said, 'Go ahead and eat, it's fine!' He said 'I don't know how! I do not understand this food, what do you do with it?' I was amazed that he'd never had fajitas, or any Mexican food for that matter before! After he'd managed to roll one up (asking about what the salsa and guacamole were), he said 'This is a very difficult meal. I do not understand why people would want to work so hard for their food.'

Another of Nick's friends, Mike, had just got back from a wedding in California and was regaling everyone with tales of this exotic land that is America. Nick and I listened, amused, as he enthused about burgers (I will never eat a burger here again! I am ruined for life, he said), and shared how confused he was by driving. That was surprising to hear, because most people find the driving in America so easy. The combination of straight roads, lanes that are actually wide enough for a car, and automatic transmissions makes for smooth sailing compared to British standards. However, Mike was confused by two things - crosswalks and stop signs.

For crosswalks, he felt that we didn't do quite enough for them. He said 'A line painted across the road could mean anything!' He couldn't understand how we could get by without thick lines of vertical paint and flashing lights to mark them.

On stop signs, he said 'Stop really means stop - it really does!' As though he had come to a stunning revelation. Happily for Mike, who is quite polished and speaks with a posh accent, not knowing this led to his favorite American encounter. As he attempted to roll through a stop sign, a guy shouted at him in a southern accent 'A**hole!' Mike responded, 'I'm ever so sorry, did I do something wrong?' To which he received--er...a commonly used automobiling hand gesture. We might have found the exchange normal or annoying, but he was so excited to have encountered a real, live, Angry American, like when the black bear at the zoo roars.

You can imagine how proud Nick and I were hearing this story! We showed those Brits who rules the roads.

Office Life in Britain

I’ve been spending a whole lot of time at the office recently, so while we catch up on organizing travel pictures I might as well tell a bit about work life.

To start, we’ve been embroiled in a fierce inter-office competition called the Arup Cup for some time now, with teams (like bridges, highways, IT) competing in ridiculous competitions over lunch to assert office dominance and presumably build morale. The British are known for inventing games (croquet, rugby, soccer, billiards, cricket, cheese-rolling, etc.) and then loosing to the rest of the world in those games. No, no, that’s a bit harsh, and I have to compliment them on the incredible array of sports they’ve developed. The nearest comparison I can make is that Brits of all ages seem to be as inventive as US college students in dreaming up new games and competitions.

I’ll give you a flavour for their inventiveness with two of the recent Campus Cup activities: the Pancake Race and Wellie Wanging. The origins of Pancake Day in Britain seem similar to Mardi Gras in French-speaking countries and it is a celebration that precedes Lent. Since Lent is a period of fasting and eating simply, rich ingredients like butter and sugar would all be used up by making tons of thin pancakes then eating them. That’s all pretty straight-forward, but the office adopted this into a bizarre race where teams need to flip a pancake on a skillet while ducking under or jumping over poles, and finally running through a gauntlet of co-workers armed with whiffle balls. My bridges team was pleased to be crowned winner for this event, as you can see from the proud photo:

The competition continued in another great British test of manhood: Wellie Wanging. A bit of preference: a “Wellie” is a type of completely waterproof boot worn by the Duke of Wellington which most Brits are obsessed with. I certainly understand how important waterproof clothing must be to them here, but the Wellie seems to enjoy an almost cult following. Anyway, in an effort to look for new ways to use their boots, the game of Wellie Wanging was invented where you pretty much just see who can hurl a Wellie the farthest. Here’s a great one of me mid-launch:

So yeah, all in all a pretty serious place to work. It’s not just games though--the other week I had to go down to the London office for a long, boring, and ostensibly important meeting. They gave us an hour break for lunch, so I pulled out my trusty A-Z street map and found I was 5 minutes walk from the British Library. That sounded like a nice destination, so I went there and over my lunch hour saw i) an original Guttenberg Bible, ii) the Magna Carta, iii) the first map of America, iv) Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, and got a sandwich in the café. It was the most culturally scintillating lunch ever, and you can’t do that many places…I mean antiquities and good roast beef!?

Walking Heroes

My Mom and her sister, Aunt Mary Beth, are my heroes. They are both cancer survivors in remission, praise God. About a year ago, last June, they read that if you walked for 30 minutes over the course of the day, you reduce your risk of cancer recurrence. Most people would hear that, sigh, and add it to the bottom of their list of things to accomplish for the day. Not Mom and Aunt Mary Beth. They heard it as a challenge to rise to. Unfortunately, Mary Beth lives in Oklahoma (note – that is NOT the unfortunate bit!) and Mom lives nearly 800 miles away in Ohio, so it would be impossible for them to walk together and hold each other accountable….

Until they had the idea to virtually walk towards each other. Each month, they decided, they would track their miles walked, getting closer and closer to the other, until they met in the middle around St. Louis! Nick made a map for them that he updated each month with the miles walked by each, and the total percentage complete. Here’s their October map, 4 months in:

You’ll notice there are symbols in Springfield, Ohio and Tulsa, Oklahoma to represent our intrepid walkers on the next map, from December. Mom’s is Schuler’s Donuts, the absolute best donuts in the world, and Mary Beth’s is the sign for….er…some historic movie theater that I don’t know. There’s also symbols next to their names: Mom has cowboy boots for her country dancing and Mary Beth has eye glasses for her love of reading.


Finally, finally, finally, after 10 months of solid, hard-core walking, they reached each other! And actually met up in real life, with a long weekend in St. Louis in May (see fireworks below).

The picture below is from a different trip, but it sums up the celebrating that occurred! I am so proud of you both!